"Meghalaya" (Land of the clouds)

9 de June - 23 July - 2011.

Galería Rita Castellote

c/ San Lucas 9

28004 - Madrid

Spain

It is obvious that a photographic epistemology is very doubtful. The photographic image as a document entails a highly greater degree of difficulty than the immediacy of a real presence. Photography as a document lives in a mess of sociopolitical conditioners and impositions of a certain speech of power modeled by the one who grasps the camera.

It is not easy to decipher all the visual information contained in a photograph, and it is very easy to decipher it erroneously. Many written sources are needed to comprehend the visual content of a photograph, many more than a painting or a sculpture, which are more direct, and more sensorial. With photography we are facing a technical language filled with subjectivity. This makes this language a slave of other signs, heir of the reality from which it is born.

Except for some pictorial photographic experiments, all photographs are anchored to a physical reality (as abstract as it can be). Perhaps not while conceptualizing an image, but certainly in it´s how to do. Thus, a photograph is a centrifugal sign in its relation to the reality that displays, whereas other languages are more centripetal.

Written or manipulated photographs are not something new, in a glimpse we can think about Joel Peter Witkin, Arnulf Rainer, Gérard Ritcher, or more recently Shirin Neshat, Jim Golberg, Jose Ramon Bas. Just to enumerate a few artists whom have used manipulation to distract from the immediate meaning of their images, or to complete an idea for which more than an image is needed.  

In Diego Alonso´s case the texts appears on the images to juxtapose two languages. One visual contemporary language put together with an archaic tribal language. An abstract language as it is the Khasi language from Meghalaya which was written for the first time with the first arrival of western missionaries, against a visual language as photography. It is not arbitrary to mix these two languages. The written texts over the images talk about legends, folk tales about the beginning of time and the moral rules that these tribes have been verbally carrying for centuries. Something near to what photography does today in our society, divulge cosmogony, documentation and the arts of our culture.

In this case the artist uses a documental story and his personal experience to surpass the referential and poetic functions (Jakobson) of photography, and to erase the conflict of trueness that is innate in any photography. To be able to speak about photography as a language, instead of take it as a tongue. The visual language of our times, which is a language that destroys memory, confronted to a verbal language, previous to writing, which creates and feeds a continuously growing collective memory, generation after generation.

Horacio Basilicus.
Madrid, May 2011.